Eberle, Wosner & Kreutzer

To the Wigmore on Saturday, for once in a while not full, maybe two thirds. Programme seemed popular enough and one would have thought that neither tennis nor football would have dented attendance much. And the chap in front of us said that prom tickets were selling fast, so it was not a summer holiday problem. Maybe prom people don't do chamber music. Or maybe once the proms come over the horizon, people stop going to concert halls.

I liked the Beethoven Op. 23 a lot and got on with the Brahms Op.100, but the audience as a whole was rather restrained. After the interval we had the Schoenberg, interesting but long enough at 10 minutes. After which things really got going on the Kreutzer, working up to a terrific climax. Audience now very excited, so perhaps just as well we had the musical equivalent of a cup of hot chocolate as an encore to send us on our way.

To find, in our case, that the splendid aquarium in Pull & Bear (see 14th May) had been turned off in favour of some rather loud information about a sale. And a couple of chaps in front of John Lewis, one using some old plastic pots for drums and the other doing some very energetic exercises, perhaps the sort of thing you do in hip discos these days. Rather a noisy contrast to what we had just left, but soon enough safely down the tube on our way to Vauxhall.

No phones went off during the concert, but we did have a tall & energetic nodder to time in front of us. Luckily, enough to my right not to be in my line of vision. My only other comment would be that sometimes the violin, particularly in its quieter bits, got a bit more lost than it ought to have done against the piano. But, overall, very good.

PS: we learned on the way out that the Allegri Quartet are having a 60th birthday concert. They are unusual in that they have been in continuous existence for a long time - we used to hear them in the QEH when we were first married - and have survived a lot of changes of personnel. There is a history at http://www.allegriquartet.org.uk/ which I shall try to get around to reading.